The Most Anticipated New York Theater of 2019

The Most Anticipated New York Theater of 2019

Look ahead to the busy pipeline of productions opening from January through summer, on Broadway and off.

Unlike the movie calendar, which floods the market with prestige releases for awards consideration toward the end of every year, the New York theater season begins and ends midyear, pegged to the Tony Awards in June, meaning a whole slate of major shows is still to come.

The 2018-19 theater season has already been established as a
corrective to last season’s dearth of strong new plays on Broadway. That
trend kicks in immediately after the holidays with Choir Boy
(Samuel J. Friedman Theatre, opening Jan. 8), a coming-of-age drama set
in a prestigious African-American prep school, written by Tarell Alvin
McCraney, who won a 2017 screenplay Oscar for Moonlight. The
production was first seen in an earlier off-Broadway run, with talented
newcomer Jeremy Pope reprising his role as a gay youth whose appointment
as head of the gospel choir sparks tension.

One of the most singularly gifted theater artists to emerge in the
past ten years is genderqueer iconoclast Taylor Mac, whose unique
pop-cultural kaleidoscope, A 24-Decade History of Popular Music, became a cult sensation after performances in New York, San Francisco and abroad. Mac’s Broadway debut, Gary: A Sequel to Titus Andronicus (Booth
Theatre, April 11), promises to be no less distinctive. The political
comedy riffs on Shakespeare’s blood-drenched first tragedy, with Nathan
Lane and Andrea Martin as servants charged with cleaning up the corpses
of the fallen Roman Empire’s civil war, and Kristine Nielsen as a
midwife found among the casualties, near death.

Lucas Hnath, whose Ibsen response, A Doll’s House, Part 2, was a Tony-winning vehicle for Metcalf in 2017, reunites with the actress on Hillary and Clinton
(Golden Theatre, April 18). Metcalf stars opposite John Lithgow as the
political power couple in a behind-the-scenes dramatization of a pivotal
moment both in the 2008 Democratic primaries campaign and in an
enduring marriage.

The young Rupert Murdoch is the subject of Ink (Samuel J.
Friedman Theatre, April 24), James Graham’s rollicking depiction of the
Australian media tycoon’s initial assault on the British tabloids in
1969. Bertie Carvel reprises his Olivier Award-winning performance as
Murdoch from the original London staging, starring opposite Jonny Lee
Miller as Larry Lamb, the rogue editor who teamed with him to make over
failing daily The Sun.

Off-Broadway, as always, offers the greatest concentration of anticipated new plays — or at least, new to New York.

Among them is Fleabag (SoHo Playhouse, March 7), the solo
vehicle that spawned writer-performer Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s critically
adored BBC/Amazon series of the same name, about a self-obsessed,
unfiltered Londoner with a voracious sexual appetite and a gift for
alienating friends and family. Waller-Bridge has since gone on to even
wider acclaim as the creator and writer of the hit series Killing Eve.

Breakout Hamilton discovery Daveed Diggs, who won a Tony for
the dual role of Marquis de Lafayette and Thomas Jefferson, will return
to the stage in Suzan-Lori Parks’ reflection on race, friendship and
self-preservation, White Noise (Public Theater, March 20).

Veteran master of the off-kilter comedy John Guare brings a new work, Nantucket Sleigh Ride (Mitzi E. Newhouse Theatre, March 18), to Lincoln Center Theater, birthplace of his classic plays The House of Blue Leaves and Six Degrees of Separation.
John Larroquette stars as a playwright-turned-stockbroker who ventures
from New York to the Massachusetts island and gets mixed up with a giant
lobster, Roman Polanski, a pornography ring, Walt Disney, stranded
children, a murder and Jorge Luis Borges, just for starters. The action
shifts between the present day and memory interludes in the 1970s.

Following a remarkable run of prestige film and TV projects,
in-demand actor Michael Stuhlbarg will be back on the New York stage
after a 10-year absence, playing the title role in Tim Blake Nelson’s Socrates (Public Theater, April 16), about the rise and fall of one of the forefathers of Western philosophy.

Emerging talent Jeremy O. Harris, whose provocative Slave Play
has turned heads in its current premiere engagement, is a third-year
student at Yale School of Drama and already has his second major New
York production lined up. That’s Daddy (Signature Center, March
5), starring Alan Cumming, Ronald Peet and Charlayne Woodard,
respectively, as a wealthy white art collector, his younger
African-American lover, and the latter’s mother, whose feathers are
ruffled by the May-December romance.

Gyllenhaal stars alongside Tom Sturridge, both actors continuing
their collaborations with British playwrights in the intimate double
bill of one-acts, Sea Wall/A Life (Public Theater, Feb. 14). Sturridge performs Simon Stephens’ Sea Wall, an intense monologue about love and the human need to know the unknowable, while Gyllenhaal in Nick Payne’s A Life ponders how we say goodbye to those we love most.

Propelled by major acclaim for its London premiere at the National
Theatre, Ben Power’s adaptation of Italian playwright Stefano Massini’s The Lehman Trilogy (Park Avenue Armory, March 27) promises to be a theatrical highlight of the spring. Directed by Sam Mendes, hot off The Ferryman,
this generations-spanning chronicle of the immigrant brothers whose
descendants became finance giants, ultimately triggering the subprime
mortgage crisis of 2007, stars Simon Russell Beale, Adam Godley and Ben
Miles.

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